...and you thought only FUNimation was having problems?...

Apparently, so is Crunchyroll now, too. From a reddit post that sparked the investigation,

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/5yv8a7/crunchyroll_has_reduced_bitrate_by_4070_damaging/
Rewrite's new episode has an average bitrate of just ~900kbps, compared to ~3100kbps for ep 21.
They are encoding with an unspecified version of x264 core 142, which means it dates to 2014. They updated from last week, when they were still using core 120 r2120 (released late 2011). Their x264 settings are based on the fast preset, rather than spending extra time to make it look better. In fact they lowered some of their settings in the update: old on top vs new on bottom (don't view in browser, view in editor that preserves whitespace and doesn't wrap lines)

I personally don't see much reason to pay for Crunchyroll if they are going to sell me garbage. People have been asking them for years to increase video quality (old bitrate + settings was insufficient) and now they have done the exact opposite.

This all happened this weekend. It appears they were "testing" new encoder, one that effectively lowers bandwidth. Just because something is "1080p", doesn't mean every frame pixel is updated; nor does it mean full range of colors, nor it is actually "1080". This refers to the bitrate of the encoding, one that apparently been causing probelms for FUNINOW new player.

Now historically speaking, on peak times (weekend nights) CR site/player crashes with 500 errors alot. This weekend, I did notice far less, if any, player errors while I was marathoning "Log Horizon". But I did notice at times, a few episodes were "throttling" higher/lower quality 720 mid stream. So, this "adaptive bitrate" is the issue.

Indeed, to be fair, this "fan outrage" could be misleading, as if it were only to come at a time during peak usage, and it may be not permanent. However, there are some other changed issues as well with new encoder; and it does show a trend that CR may be "trying to cheat" instead of actually taking all their 1 million sub numbers and buying better server tech.

In either case, the "issue" seemed to backfired enough just in a day for "Fearless Overlord" to take notice:

edit: Just woke up, a PM said this has been reverted. Haven't confirmed myself but have seen some evidence to say it may be true. Note that herkz says CR has previously been re-encoding at lower bitrate after one week, so it may be they've gone back to this

Of course, there are reports nothing actually has changed. More info can be found on the CR thread...

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